velias said:
It was alluded in the Grin email newsletter a week ago that a new firmware rev V 1.0 ? would be released in early July.
Wonder what is in it and when it will actually be released?
Hey Velias, I was hoping that we'd have released it early last week but we ran into a few hiccups in merging branches of code together and have needed some more time to iron that out here. It's looking like we are talking just days away at this stage.
Also I think they should document the charge graph screen better in the manual, I just discovered it by accident.
Ah, that's just the placeholder graph screen. I discussed it as well as the intended graph screen back on Page5 of this thread
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=914831#p914831
The proper charge graph display is one of the main features of the V1.0 firmware build, and it will autoscale the voltage exactly as you inferred (going from Vmax/2 to Vmax) so the voltage curve is better accentuated, the charge current is shown as a solid line as opposed to the voltage which is a bar area, and there will be labels to call out the actual charge voltages. Here's an example of a mostly charged battery that was plugged in, so it's predominantly just in CV state with the current dropping.
The other key features in the 1.0 release are full logging of all the charge statistics. So in addition to scrolling to a charge graph while charging, there is also another page showing the charge history of of that profile. This photo is on a freshly flashed Satiator so it's all zero, but you can imagine on the left would be the lifetime number of charge cycles and kWhr + Ah that this profile has seen, and the right column averages these out per cycle so that you can see what the typical charge has looked like, in terms of how many hours it took and the total energy that went into the pack.
The idea here is to have something similar to the Cycle Analyst for keeping a log history of your battery usage. It's not exactly 1:1, so if say you have 2 or 3 different profiles that you use with the same pack then you'd need to add up the totals from all those profiles to see what the particular battery has been exposed to, but that's straightforward enough.
Plus, we've added a new "About Charger" section to the advanced setup menu which shows the full lifetime statistics of the Satiator across all profiles.
This will be a convenient place to check the charger hardware and firmware revisions and see the entire lifetime usage of the device. So how many total hours that the Satiator has been plugged in, how many hours it has spent charging, and how many total Ahrs and Kwhrs that it has put into battery packs. This will be useful both to us doing reliability / longevity analysis, and for any data crunching type who is interested in seeing their lifetime total battery energy usage and economics. And unlike the profile statistics which will get lost for instance if you delete the profile, the totals here are tied to the unit and can't be edited or lost.
Hopefully that answers some of the "what to expect in the next firmware update" question. There are also a whole pile of smaller tweaks that will be covered in detail with the release notes, a large part of which is thanks to user feedback here. Things like remembering the previous charge amp-hours after you disconnect a pack, having a "connected to PC" written on the screen when the device is in bootloader mode, battery temperature readouts on all chemistries if a thermistor is plugged in, the ability to start a charge even when the Satiator's output thinks that there is a short circuit fault, etc.
I'll be really excited to make this finally go live since it feels like it's been a loooong time coming, but there's no sense pushing it prematurely when there are still a few known bugs getting worked out.
